GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Saturday 11 May was the first day out in the pastures, as a herd, for cows at a farm above Sierre, canton Valais in Switzerland.
The Val d’Herens cows are famously called fighting cows because the pregnant cows, with hormones ready to take on the world, battle each other to find the leader of the herd. She’s the strongest and smartest of the group, the one they know will lead them to the best places when they are taken to the high alps for summer grazing. Left to themselves, the cows fight in pastures. Taken down the road to an arena, where people line up to watch, they do the same thing. The difference is a certain amount of betting.
Swiss media are still debating, 10 days after the national fighting cow finals, whether it’s acceptable for arena competitions to be turned into tourism events that pull in huge crowds, with stepped-up marketing.
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Cow fightng photos: Nick Bates
The national finals 5 May followed a round of regional fights; it was held in Icogne, near Crans-Montana and Sion, and pulled in 15,000 people, 60,000 television viewers and another 10,000 on the Internet, to the delight of local businesses. The event had a budget of CHF1.2 million, a far cry from local cow fights held throughout the country.
However the public debate ends, cows will go on fighting. Last Saturday neighbours settled in on benches carried up to the pasture and began to pass around homemade air-dried meats, freshly baked bread and wine.
One by one the cows are led out from the barn, bells clanging loudly as they trot up the hill.
The little calves and the bull have a dull day in the barn, while 300 metres higher up the older girls fight it out.
The role of farmer Raphael and his helpers is to make sure the cows don’t get too out of line or injure each other. Indeed, Saturday one of the cows was rolled by another one, quite a sight, and later in the day Raphael called the vet when one of the cows lost a horn. She’d already lost the other one, a worrisome situation for a farmer, who can’t leave her unprotected for the summer, high in the alpine meadows.
At the end of the day the hillside resonates with the farmer calling his cows back into the barn for the night. They all have names, so Laila and Désirée are cajoled like old friends into settling down in the barn that smells sweetly of hay.